Who are those scowling faces
congealed from their resentful pasts?
And smiling unctuous ones
oozing from sanctimony?
Or the tweeters and those
who weave their fabrications
into whole-cloth fantasy?

They are disaster’s chorus
who used to flutter at the screens
but now have breached them
by inattention and design
to cluster at the incandescent source,
to crackle their own and our skins, too
in the game of power.

The head conniver, having wrung
concession from the prior prissy management
convenes his random screeds
to make superrogatory but premature
ejaculations into the mouths
of followers taken in by his small hands
and hyperinflated confidences
that he can do it all
on his Boeing fly.

And the public audiences expand
across a narrow band
of hard-nosed, hard-headed devotés
and those hoping to slake his mania
for sudden choppy medleys of faith and fiction
in his own brilliant insight, dealing somehow
in fantasy, while we await
their deadly pay-offs.

Can we escape the big tent’s rafters
collapsing on us all?
Or seize the pulleys, firm the stays
and drive out this comedic fake and followers
before they blow it all down, or up?